Medion LifeTab P9514

A tablet at an affordable price

Here we are reviewing another tablet from the so many available and the reason for choosing the Medion LifeTab P9514 is it’s affordable price. This tablet didn’t make an impression on us and you’ll see for yourself it is actually an average device, like many others as well. It has some weak points and drawbacks, like the lack of a full-sized USB port or its heaviness but it is not altogether bad. We ran some tests on it so we can give you a detailed description and the results are below.

Good quality 10 inch display

The Medion LifeTab P9514 has a capacitive 10 inch multi-touch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and is good in delivering bright and crisp images. The bad thing about it is that it’s too glossy and you can almost see nothing on it in bright light. In addition, there are some noticeable dots on the display, visible in shiny light. We don’t know why they are there but we didn’t really like seeing them on the screen. Other than that the display has good viewing angles and responded quickly to our moves.

The design of the tablet is again regular, like that of any Android tablet, but the LifeTab P9514 felt compact and well made in our hands. On the front it has a glossy finish and below the screen there’s a silver strip with the “LifeTab” branding written on it. On the back it has a soft grey plastic cover.

1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor

The tablet features a 2 megapixel front facing camera and a 5 megapixel camera on the rear and has some connectivity ports around the edges. On the left under a plastic cover you can find the microSD and SIM card slots and beside them there are a microUSB port and 3.5 headphone jack.You can hook up the tablet to a larger display with the HDMI-out adapter it ships with in the box. For data transfer, don’t worry, the tablet has support for HSPA, WiFi and also Bluetooth.

Inside, the Medion LifeTab P9514 packs a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and 32GB of built-in internal storage. The tablet is responsive and we notices little lag during the benchmarks. A strong point is that it comes with built-in 3G connectivity and it also offers access to the Android Market from where you can download all the apps you want and need, occupying all those 32GB of storage.

Difficult to recharge

Other than its lack of a full-sized USB port, the 720g it weights are yet another weak point. Being that heavy, it is difficult to hold it in just one hand for a long period of time, like we’re used to with other, lighter tablets. The battery also didn’t last for long during our benchmarks. The company says it is supposed to last for about eight hours, but we never had an over five and a half hour’s privilege. The charging is made through a dock and not through the USB port, but the good part is that it’s faster. The bad part is that it’s more difficult to charge it in other places than home, considering the low battery life.

It runs on Android Honeycomb and we don’t know yet if an Ice Cream Sandwich is available for the LifeTab P9514.

Games included

We were happy to find an ES File Explorer app pre-installed and also a Flash Web browser. As for other apps, the tablet also includes Documents to Go suite, giving you the possibility of creating or editing PowerPoint, Word or Excel files. Two games, Galaxy on Fire 2 and Dungeon Defenders HD, and a Drawing Pad app are also included on the tablet and we’re sure you’ll find them useful at some point.

Conclusion

The fact that it has 3G connectivity and 32GB of storage means that the Medion LifeTab P9514 is worth your attention, but the weight and poor battery performance make it an average and not very competitive tablet.